“I had a white suit made in 1960, started wearing it in January – and found it annoyed people tremendously. It’s kind of a harmless form of aggression.” Tom Wolfe

What’s Worse Than Actual Dead Jews?

Just Another Guy Named Mo

While American Jews prepare for their upcoming Passover seders, during which Rick Santorum and/or Rush Limbaugh will replace Pharaoh as the latest nemesis of Jews and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Sandra Fluke and Barack Obama will will vie for the role of Moses, back on planet earth a few lonely observers seem to get it.

The killer of French schoolchildren and soldiers turns out to be a man called Mohammed Merah. The story can now proceed according to time-honored tradition:

Stage One: The strange compulsion to assure us that the killer is a “right wing conservative extremist”… The insistence that the killer was emblematic of an epidemic of right-wing hate sweeping the planet is, regrettably, no longer operative. Instead, the killer isn’t representative of anything at all.

So on to Stage Two: Okay, he may be called Mohammed but he’s a “lone wolf.” Sure, he says he was trained by al-Qaeda, but what does he know? Don’t worry, folks, he’s just a lone wolf like Major Hasan and Faisal Shahzad and all the other card-carrying members of the Amalgamated Union of Lone Wolves. All jihad is local.

On to Stage Three: Okay, even if there are enough lone wolves around to form their own Radio City Rockette line, it’s still nothing to do with Islam…

And then, of course, Stage Four: The backlash that never happens. Because apparently the really bad thing about actual dead Jews is that it might lead to dead non-Jews: “French Muslims Fear Backlash After Shooting.” Likewise, after Major Hasan’s mountain of dead infidels, “Shooting Raises Fears For Muslims In US Army.” Likewise, after the London Tube slaughter, “British Muslims Fear Repercussions After Tomorrow’s Train Bombing.” Oh, no, wait, that’s a parody, though it’s hard to tell.

Look…isn’t it just a teensy-weensy little bit to do with Islam? Or at any rate the internal contradictions of one-way multiculturalism? No, it’s not a competition. Most times in today’s Europe, the guys beating, burning and killing Jews will be Muslims. Once in a while, it will be somebody else killing the schoolkids. But is it so hard to acknowledge that rapid, transformative, mass Muslim immigration might not be the most obvious aid to social tranquility? That it might possibly pose challenges that would otherwise not have existed — for uncovered women in Oslo, for gays in Amsterdam, for Jews everywhere? Is it so difficult to wonder if, for these and other groups living in a long-shot social experiment devised by their rulers, the price of putting an Islamic crescent in the diversity quilt might be too high? What’s left of Jewish life in Europe is being extinguished remorselessly, one vandalized cemetery, one subway attack at a time. How many Jewish children will be at that school in Toulouse a decade hence? A society that becomes more Muslim eventually becomes less everything else. What is happening on the Continent is tragic, in part because it was entirely unnecessary.

Meanwhile back in Obama’s America, NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly seems to be “disturbing” a lot of New York Jews and other liberals like Attorney General Eric Holder by keeping close watch on mosques and Muslims in general, even outside of New York City, especially those Muslims who like to vacation on the lovely beaches of Pakistan and Afghanistan, as the Toulouse “lone wolf” liked to do. One French government official said that the only way they could’ve captured the latest guy named Mo before he murdered Jewish kids would have been to turn France into a “police state.”

I mean, how many times does a French citizen of Algerian descent have to travel to Pakistan and/or Afghanistan before the cops raid his apartment and drag him down to headquarters for some serious conversation?

To my American Jewish relatives and acquaintances: Yes, I know we don’t live in France; however, if you are planning to hold your Passover seder at an identifiable Jewish sight, it wouldn’t hurt to budget for a well-armed couple of guards outside along with the matzoh and gefilte fish.